Finding a Correlation Between Aggressivity of Cancer and DNA Repair Capacity

Authors

Kristie I. Aamodt, Brigham Young University
Dr. Kim L. O'Neill, Brigham Young University

Keywords

aggressive cancer, DNA repair capacity, fluorescent staining

College

Life Sciences

Department

Microbiology and Molecular Biology

Abstract

The initial proposal for this project outlined the study of the link between DNA damage and aggressiveness of cancer cells. A major portion of the project involved developing a more time-efficient method of measuring DNA repair using a fluorescent staining technique that quantifies the amount of DNA that is damaged in each sample. The staining process involves using terminal deoxytransferase (tDt), an enzyme which adds nucleotides to DNA at the 3′ end of single-strand breaks. By incubating the samples with fluorescein-conjugated dUTP in addition to the enzyme, one fluorescent molecule is incorporated for each single-strand break. The amount of fluorescence in the each sample is determined by FACS analysis. By plotting the amount of fluorescence in each sample over time, the repair trends can be visualized and compared. In order to determine the effectiveness of this method we used an established protocol to damage the cells with hydrogen peroxide which induces single-strand breaks and collected samples at various time points.

Recommended Citation

Aamodt, Kristie I. and O'Neill, Dr. Kim L. (2013) "Finding a Correlation Between Aggressivity of Cancer and DNA Repair Capacity," Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 2013: Iss. 1, Article 1266.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2013/iss1/1266